m; and because of them Sam's father had carried a white face
to his grave.

My father and mother (said Sam) married late in life, for his trade was
what mine is, and 'twasn't till her fortieth year that my mother could
bring herself to kiss a gravedigger. That accounts, maybe, for my being
born rickety and with other drawbacks that only made father the fonder.
Weather permitting, he'd carry me off to churchyard, set me upon a flat
stone, with his coat folded under, and talk to me while he delved.
I can mind, now, the way he'd settle lower and lower, till his head
played hidey-peep with me over the grave's edge, and at last he'd be
clean swallowed up, but still discoursing or calling up how he'd come
upon wonderful towns and kingdoms down underground, and how all the
kings and queens there, in dyed garments, was offering him meat for his
dinner every day of the week if he'd only stop and hobbynob with them--
and all such gammut. He prettily doted on me--the poor old ancient!

But there came a day--a dry afternoon in the late wheat harvest--when we
were up in the churchyard together, and though father had his tools
beside him, not a tint did he work, but kept travishing back and forth,
one time shading his eyes and gazing out to sea, and then looking far
along the Plymouth road for minutes at a time. Out by Bradden Point
there stood a little dandy-rigged craft, tacking lazily to and fro, with
her mains'le all shiny-yellow in the sunset. Though I didn't know it
then, she was the Preventive boat, and her business was to watch the
Hauen: for there had been a brush between her and the _Unity_ lugger, a
fortnight back, and a Preventive man shot through the breast-bone, and
my mother's brother Philip was hiding down in the town. I minded,
later, how that the men across the vale, in Farmer Tresidder's
wheat-field, paused every now and then, as they pitched the sheaves, to
give a look up towards the churchyard, and the gleaners moved about in
small knots, causeying and glancing over their shoulders at the cutter
out in the bay; and how, when all the field was carried, they waited
round the last load, no man offering to cry the _Neck_, as the fashion
was, but lingering till sun was near down behind the slope and the long
shadows stretching across the stubble.

"Sha'n't thee go underground to-day, father?" says I, at last.

He turned slowly round, and says he, "No, sonny. 'Reckon us'll climb
skywards for a change."

An